“We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it. ”

These two sentences, from Secretary of State Clinton’s groundbreaking speech on Internet freedom, sum up beautifully the challenge facing our Internet policy. An open Internet can advance our values and support our interests; but we will only get there if we make some difficult choices now.

One of these choices relates to anonymity. Will it be easy to speak anonymously on the Internet, or not? This was the subject of the first question in the post-speech Q&A:

QUESTION: You talked about anonymity on line and how we have to prevent that. But you also talk about censorship by governments. And I’m struck by – having a veil of anonymity in certain situations is actually quite beneficial. So are you looking to strike a balance between that and this emphasis on censorship?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the challenges we face. On the one hand, anonymity protects the exploitation of children. And on the other hand, anonymity protects the free expression of opposition to repressive governments. Anonymity allows the theft of intellectual property, but anonymity also permits people to come together in settings that gives them some basis for free expression without identifying themselves.

None of this will be easy. I think that’s a fair statement. I think, as I said, we all have varying needs and rights and responsibilities. But I think these overriding principles should be our guiding light. We should err on the side of openness and do everything possible to create that, recognizing, as with any rule or any statement of principle, there are going to be exceptions.

So how we go after this, I think, is now what we’re requesting many of you who are experts in this area to lend your help to us in doing. We need the guidance of technology experts. In my experience, most of them are younger than 40, but not all are younger than 40. And we need the companies that do this, and we need the dissident voices who have actually lived on the front lines so that we can try to work through the best way to make that balance you referred to.

Secretary Clinton’s answer is trying to balance competing interests, which is what good politicians do. If we want A, and we want B, and A is in tension with B, can we have some A and some B together? Is there some way to give up a little A in exchange for a lot of B? That’s a useful way to start the discussion.

But sometimes you have to choose — sometimes A and B are profoundly incompatible. That seems to be the case here. Consider the position of a repressive government that wants to spy on a citizen’s political speech, as compared to the position of the U.S. government when it wants to eavesdrop on a suspect’s conversations under a valid search warrant. The two positions are very different morally, but they are pretty much the same technologically. Which means that either both governments can eavesdrop, or neither can. We have to choose.

Secretary Clinton saw this tension, and, being a lawyer, she saw that law could not resolve it. So she expressed the hope that technology, the aspect she understood least, would offer a solution. This is a common pattern: Given a difficult technology policy problem, lawyers will tend to seek technology solutions and technologists will tend to seek legal solutions. (Paul Ohm calls this “Felten’s Third Law”.) It’s easy to reject non-solutions in your own area because you have the knowledge to recognize why they will fail; but there must be a solution lurking somewhere in the unexplored wilderness of the other area.

If we’re forced to choose — and we will be — what kind of Internet will we have? In Secretary Clinton’s words, “the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.” We’ll have a free Internet, if we can keep it.

If you’re interested at all in surveillance policy, go and read Chris Soghoian’s long and impassioned post today. Chris drops several bombshells into the debate, including an audio recording of a closed-door talk by Sprint/NexTel’s Electronic Surveillance Manager, bragging about how easy the company has made it for law enforcement to get customers’ location data — so easy that the company has serviced over eight million law enforcement requests for customer location data.

Here’s the juiciest quote:

“[M]y major concern is the volume of requests. We have a lot of things that are automated but that’s just scratching the surface. One of the things, like with our GPS tool. We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy, so, just the sheer volume of requests they anticipate us automating other features, and I just don’t know how we’ll handle the millions and millions of requests that are going to come in.

— Paul Taylor, Electronic Surveillance Manager, Sprint Nextel.

Chris has more quotes, facts, and figures, all implying that electronic surveillance is much more widespread that many of us had thought.

Probably, many of these surveillance requests were justified, in the sense that a fair-minded citizen would think their expected public benefit justified the intrusiveness. How many were justified, we don’t know. We can’t know — and that’s a big part of the problem.

It’s deeply troubling that this has happened without significant public debate or even much disclosure. We need to have a discussion — and quickly — about what the rules for electronic surveillance should be.

Last Friday, the New York Times published an article about counterfeit Cisco products that have been sold as if they were genuine and are widely used throughout the U.S. government. The article also raised the concern that these counterfeits could well be engineered with malicious intent, but that this appears not to have been the case. There was an immediate Slashdot thread as well, but a number of issues are still worth commenting on.

First things first: the facts, as best we understand them. The New York Times reports that approximately 3500 counterfeit Cisco components (worth $3.5M) have been discovered as a result of a two-year FBI investigation. A Cisco spokesman is quoted saying that they found “no evidence of re-engineering.” In other words, we’re talking about faithful knock-offs of legitimate products.

If you go to the FBI’s unclassified PowerPoint presentation (dated January 11, 2008), you’ll see all the actual information. This is a fascinating read. For starters, let’s talk about the cost. The slides claim you can get a counterfeit router for approximately 1/6 the cost of a genuine router. (You can do similarly well buying used gear on eBay.) The counterfeit gear looks an awful lot like the genuine article. Detecting differences here is as difficult as detecting counterfeit money, counterfeit Rolex watches, or counterfeit signatures from sports stars. Given the apparent discrepancy between component cost and street value, we should be no more surprised to find knock-off Cisco gear than we are to find knock-off everything else.

It’s claimed that these counterfeits are built to lower manufacturing standards than the original equipment, causing higher failure rates. One even caught fire due to a faulty power supply. Likewise, the fakers are making stupid errors, like building multiple components with the same MAC address. (MAC addresses, by design, are meant to be unique – no two ever the same.)

The really interesting story is all about the supply chain. Consider how you might buy yourself a new Mac. You could go to your local Apple store. Or you could get it from any of a variety of other stores, who in turn may have gotten it from Apple directly or may have gone through a distributor. Apparently, for Cisco gear, it’s much more complicated than that. The U.S. government buys from “approved” vendors, who might then buy from multiple tiers of sub-contractors. In one case, one person bought shady gear from eBay and resold it to the government, moving a total of $1M in gear before he was caught. In a more complicated case, Lockheed Martin won a bid for a U.S. Navy project. They contracted with an unauthorized Cisco reseller who in turn contracted with somebody else, who used a sub-contractor, who then directly shipped the counterfeit gear to the Navy. (The slides say that $250K worth of counterfeit gear was sold; duplicate serial numbers were discovered.)

Why is this happening? The Government wants to save money, so they look for contractors who can give them the best price, and their contracts allow for subcontracts, direct third-party shipping, and so forth. There is no serious vetting of this supply chain by either Cisco or the government. Apparently, Cisco doesn’t do direct sales except for high-end, specialized gear. You’d think Cisco would follow the lead of the airline industry, among others, and cut out the distributors to keep the profit for themselves.

Okay, on to the speculation. Both the New York Times and the FBI presentation concern themselves with Trojan Horses. Even though there’s no evidence that any of this counterfeit gear was actually malicious, the weak controls in the supply chain make it awfully easy for such compromised gear to be sold into sensitive parts of the government, raising all the obvious concerns.

Consider a recent paper by U. Illinois’s Sam King et al. where they built a “malicious processor”. The idea is pretty clever. You send along a “secret knock” (e.g., a network packet with a particular header) which triggers a sensor that enables “shadow code” to start running alongside the real operating system. The Illinois team built shadow code that compromised the Linux login program, adding a backdoor password. After the backdoor was tripped, it would disable the shadow code, thus going back to “normal” operation.

The military is awfully worried about this sort of threat, as well they should be. For that matter, so are voting machine critics. It’s awfully easy for “stealth” malicious behavior to exist in legitimate systems, regardless of how carefully you might analyze or test it. Ken Thompson’s classic paper, Reflections on Trusting Trust, shows how he designed a clever Trojan Horse for Unix. [Edit: it’s unclear that it ever got released into the wild.]

Okay everybody, let’s put on our evil hats. If your goal was to get a Trojan Horse router into a sensitive military environment, how would you do it and how would it behave? Clearly, the weak supply chain is an excellent vector for getting the gear into place. Given the resources of a nation-state intelligence agency, you could afford to buy genuine Cisco parts and modify them, rather than using low-cost, counterfeit gear. Nobody would detect you; you wouldn’t screw up and ship multiple boxes with the same serial number.

How will you implement your Trojan Horse logic? Pretty much any gear you’ll ever find of any modest complexity will have software running inside it. Even line cards have embedded processors of some sort. For all that hardware, there’s software, and that’s what you’d go to install your logic bomb. The increasing use of FPGAs in industrial designs means you could also “rewire” those parts to behave arbitrarily, much like the Illinois hack; you’d really want to get a hold of the original VHDL “source code”, leveraging your aforementioned spying prowess, to simplify the design and implementation of your malicious behavior. Hacking the raw netlists (the FPGA-equivalent of machine code) would be possible, but would be far more painful. [See Sidebar.]

What sort of behavior would you build in? The New York Times raises the idea of a kill switch. I send your router a magic packet and it dies. That’s too easy. How about I send your router a magic packet, it then forwards it on to all of its peers, repeatedly, and then they all die a few seconds later? That’s a pretty good denial of service attack (nevermind a plot device that was the basis of a popular science fiction television series). Alternatively, following the Illinois idea, we could imagine that the magic packet turns on a monitoring feature, allowing our intelligence agency to gather all kinds of information, reconfigure the router, and so forth. If they don’t want to generate extra traffic, which might be detected, they could instead weaken the encryption of a VPN tunnel, perhaps publishing the session key through a subliminal channel of some sort, acquiring the ciphertext through “other” means.

In summary, it’s probably a good thing, from the perspective of the U.S. military, to discover that their supply chain is allowing counterfeit gear into production. This will help them clean up the supply chain, and will also provide an extra push to consider just how much they trust the sources of their equipment to ship clean software and hardware.

[Sidebar: Xilinx supports a notion of “encrypting” a netlist. Broadly speaking, the idea behind the technology is to encrypt the description of your FPGA configuration with a crypto key, such that anybody who reads the file out of your board gets encrypted garbage. However, the FPGA has the key material to decrypt the configuration and then initialize itself normally. This sort of technology is meant to serve an anti-piracy / anti-reverse-engineering purpose. It could ostensibly also serve an anti-Trojan Horse purpose, although at that point it’s really no more or less secure, semantically, than Microsoft’s Authenticode. This technology, more broadly, is also an active research area (see, for example, Roy et al.’s EPIC: Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits). Again, if we’ve got a nation-state intelligence service tampering with the system, none of this is going to provide meaningful protection for the end-user against Trojan Horses.]

Freedom to Tinker is hosted by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you'll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center's faculty, students, and friends.